Do Social Media’s Titans Use Their Own Services?

Advertisers have a dozen reasons to purchase ads on Facebook, but the foundational pitch, the one that’s allowed Facebook to outpace all newspapers, combined, in advertising revenue, is this: The Facebook News Feed is influential. That is, as Facebook tells its potential clients, the average user, who spends 20 minutes a day scrolling through a custom-tailored and exactingly targeted News Feed, is likely to buy things that appear in that News Feed. There’s some evidence that this is true; further, Facebook itself has done some (extremely shady and manipulative) research into how the composition of a given user’s News Feed affects that user’s mood. It also just makes intuitive sense. The truth is that Facebook, as a business, just doesn’t make sense unless you believe that its most profitable product, the News Feed, is influential.

False news stories that were shared hundreds of thousands of times on the network […] “surely had no impact” on the election, [Zuckerberg] said, speaking at the Techonomy conference.

“Voters make decisions based on their lived experience,” Zuckerberg went on. The notion that fake news stories on Facebook “influenced the election in any way,” he added, “is a pretty crazy idea.”

In an extended onstage interview with David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect, Zuckerberg noted that fabricated stories made up a small fraction of all the content shared on Facebook. And he suggested that the criticism Facebook has received for fueling such falsehoods was rooted in condescension on the part of people who failed to understand Donald Trump’s appeal. “I think there is a certain profound lack of empathy in asserting that the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news,” Zuckerberg said. “If you believe that, then I don’t think you internalized the message that Trump voters are trying to send in this election.”

Zuckerberg is arguing against a straw man, here; no one I’ve seen has argued that “the only reason someone could have voted the way they did is because they saw fake news.” It was a close election — a few hundred thousand votes would have swung it to Clinton — and close elections tend to be the product of multiple and difficult-to-unravel factors. It seems hard to argue that Facebook wasn’t one of those factors. Fake news wouldn’t even need to do anything as challenging or specific as transform Clinton voters to Trump voters to have changed the outcome of the election: Emotionally charged fake news could have galvanized Trump voters and ensured high turnout; or its scale and volume could have drowned out (or offered false counterweight to) the rigorously reported mainstream-media stories about Trump’s greed, corruption, and mendacity.

In the wake of Trump’s election there’s been a lot of discussion of “bubbles.” Maybe the media is in a bubble that prevented it from seeing the depth of support Trump could maintain in the Rust Belt. Maybe Midwesterners are in a bubble that stokes racism and xenophobia and fear of difference. One particularly opaque bubble seems to be that from which the titans of social media are observing their platforms. Here’s Jack Dorsey, founder and CEO of Twitter, in the days following Trump’s election:

I commit to using the privilege I currently have to always speak this truth to power, and to ensure the common good leads everything we do.

“Unacceptable,” Dorsey writes about reports of politically motivated harassment and abuse, on the network he founded, so memorably described by a former employee on BuzzFeed as “a honeypot for assholes.” If Dorsey believes such abuse is unacceptable, where has he been for the last ten years? Twitter’s marauding bands of misogynist, racist, and anti-Semitic trolls have become so notorious — and so much worse since the launch of the Trump campaign last year — that the harassment problem caused at least two suitors to walk away from an opportunity to buy the company.

The tech industry, and especially its social-media sector, has always been excited about its potential for revolutionary change — in some cases, quite literally. But its brightest lights — the founders and CEOs — seem reluctant to acknowledge the consequences of those changes. Do they even use the services they’ve created? The fact is that Zuckerberg and Dorsey are both too famous, in real life and especially on their own platforms, to ever have a regular user experience. When you lead a company and have millions of followers, you’re unlikely to be having enjoyable semi-private conversations that get crashed by abusive strangers, or to spend enough time scrolling through your News Feed that you start coming across clear lies shared by friends and family.

Now, you can’t blame social-media CEOs for denying their products are being used for (or are, in fact, incentivizing!) misinformation and harassment campaigns, any more than you can blame the arms-manufacturer CEOs for slapping “guns don’t kill people, people do” stickers on the buttstocks of their AR-15s. And it’s true that there isn’t really an easy solution for either Twitter or Facebook that doesn’t also create concerns about speech and press protections.

But if you lead a revolution, at some point you’re going to have to govern. Zuckerberg and Dorsey have created tools that legitimately changed the world, and not always for the worse. But in so doing they’ve also eliminated the physical and cultural structures — from establishment-newspaper dominance to the primacy of face-to-face interaction — that helped keep harassment, abuse, and misinformation to a smaller minimum. Now that the world is changed, it’s up to them to ensure that the best values of the past endure. They could start by at least acknowledging the problem.

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THE FEED

1:28 p.m.

WhatsApp with that?

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, uses an unofficial online messaging service for official White House business, including with foreign contacts, his lawyer told the House Oversight Committee late last year.

The lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said he was not aware if Mr. Kushner had communicated classified information on the service, WhatsApp, and said that because he took screenshots of the communications and sent them to his official White House account or the National Security Council, his client was not in violation of federal records laws.

In a letter disclosing the information, the Democratic chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee said that he was investigating possible violations of the Presidential Records Act by members of the Trump administration, including Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump. He accused the White House of stonewalling his committee on information it had requested for months.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) on Thursday urged President Donald Trump to stop disparaging the late Sen. John McCain, calling the Vietnam war hero “a dear friend” and defending him against the president’s criticisms. …

Ernst’s remarks came during a town hall meeting at a high school in Adel, Iowa, where several attendees voiced anger about Trump’s attacks about McCain. One attendee described McCain as a “genuine war hero” and called Trump’s comments about McCain “cowardly.”

“I do not appreciate his tweets,” Ernst said, when pressed by the attendee why she didn’t previously speak out more forcefully. “John McCain is a dear friend of mine. So, no I don’t agree with President Trump and he does need to stop.”

As we anticipate the end of Mueller, signs of a wind-down:-SCO prosecutors bringing family into the office for visits-Staff carrying out boxes-Manafort sentenced, top prosecutor leaving-office of 16 attys down to 10-DC US Atty stepping up in cases-grand jury not seen in 2mo

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them. Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

… Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy.

Attorneys for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and more than a dozen other defendants charged in a Florida prostitution sting filed a motion to stop the public release of surveillance videos and other evidence taken by police.

Attorneys filed the motion Wednesday in Palm Beach County court. The State of Florida does not agree with the request, according to the filing.

In the motion, the attorneys asked the court to grant a protective order to safeguard the confidentiality of the materials seized from the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, and “in particular the videos, until further order of the court.”

Two years in, White House aides are dismayed to discover the president likes lobbing pointless, nasty attacks at people like George Conway and John McCain

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

There’s no specific stipulation that Milo must be heard, so it could be worse

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.

The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures; it doesn’t prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.

Tech companies say that it is easier to identify content related to known foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda because of information-sharing with law enforcement and industry-wide efforts, such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group formed by YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter in 2017.

On Monday, for example, YouTube said on its Twitter account that it was harder for the company to stop the video of the shootings in Christchurch than to remove copyrighted content or ISIS-related content because YouTube’s tools for content moderation rely on “reference files to work effectively.” Movie studios and record labels provide reference files in advance and, “many violent extremist groups, like ISIS, use common footage and imagery,” YouTube wrote.

The cycle is self-reinforcing: The companies collect more data on what ISIS content looks like based on law enforcement’s myopic and under-inclusive views, and then this skewed data is fed to surveillance systems, Bloch-Wehba says. Meanwhile, consumers don’t have enough visibility in the process to know whether these tools are proportionate to the threat, whether they filter too much content, or whether they discriminate against certain groups, she says.

Two mystery litigants citing privacy concerns are making a last-ditch bid to keep secret some details in a lawsuit stemming from wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s history of paying underage girls for sex.

Just prior to a court-imposed deadline Tuesday, two anonymous individuals surfaced to object to the unsealing of a key lower-court ruling in the case, as well as various submissions by the parties.

Both people filed their complaints in the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which is overseeing the case. The two people said they could face unwarranted speculation and embarrassment if the court makes public records from the suit, in which Virginia Giuffre, an alleged Epstein victim, accused longtime Epstein friend Ghislaine Maxwell of engaging in sex trafficking by facilitating his sexual encounters with teenage girls. Maxwell has denied the charges.

Rescue teams in Mozambique are struggling to reach the thousands of people stranded on roofs and in trees and urgently need more helicopters and boats as post-cyclone flood waters continue to rise.

Rescue workers, military personnel and volunteers are rushing to save thousands of Mozambicans before flood levels rise further, but with four helicopters, a handful of boats and extremely difficult conditions, have only been able to save about 413 so far.

“I don’t even know if we’ve made a dent. There are just so many people. The scale is huge. We’re busy doing the best we can,” said Travis Trower from Rescue South Africa, adding that a lot of people had been washed away but those still alive, whom he had seen from helicopter flights, were in a very bad state.

More than 400 sq kilometres (150 sq miles) in the region are flooded, according to satellite images taken by the EU, and in some places the water is six metres (19ft) deep. At least 600,000 people are affected, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), ranging from those whose lives are in immediate danger to those who need other kinds of aid.